The article in the Wall Street Journal (registration required — UPDATE: I’ll put larger excerpts below the fold) should put to rest the conservative meme that FEMA (and the federal government) needs a specific request from local government before it can act in the face of a disaster. The articles points to the Department of Homeland Security’s National Response Plan, a post-Sept. 11 playbook on how to deal with catastrophic events, and says:
The plan, which was rolled out to much fanfare in January, essentially enables Washington to move federal assets to the disaster without waiting for requests from state officials. It then funnels help from all federal agencies through a single point of contact — usually the secretary of homeland security — a reform demanded after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Meanwhile, as I wrote yesterday, Bush said this (also yesterday):
Q Did they misinform you when you said that no one anticipated the breach of the levees?
THE PRESIDENT: No, what I was referring to is this. When that storm came by, a lot of people said we dodged a bullet. When that storm came through at first, people said, whew. There was a sense of relaxation, and that’s what I was referring to. And I, myself, thought we had dodged a bullet. You know why? Because I was listening to people, probably over the airways, say, the bullet has been dodged. And that was what I was referring to.
Really. Recall the title of my post that Tuesday morning ("Dodged A Bullet? Not So Much"). Obviously, I was getting my information from the "airways". So what was Bush watching?
An enterprising blogger did a Lexis/Nexis search. Was there someone who actually suggested that New Orleans "dodged a bullet"?
CNN
SHOW: CNN NEWSNIGHT AARON BROWN 10:00 PM EST
August 29, 2005 Monday
TRANSCRIPT: 082901CN.V84
HEADLINE: Hurricane Katrina Pummels Three States
BODY:AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: …Give me your most honest answer. You’re getting a lot of information from a lot of sources: From police sources, from the Coast Guard, lots of people. Do you feel you have the, what we call on television the wide shot, of how big, how bad, how deadly, how devastating the last 24 hours have been?
MICHAEL BROWN, FEMA: Well, Aaron, I’m just beginning to get that wide -angle view and I’ve got to tell you, it’s very, very sobering. I’ve had some folks out on the reconnaissance helicopters, in fact, some of them were on the helicopters that started doing the rescues from the rooftops. And I think what we see is, sure, New Orleans dodged the bullet, in the sense that the catastrophic disaster we thought would occur downtown, moved slightly to the east, 30 or 40 miles. But what that meant is that we now have literally neighborhood after neighborhood that is totally engulfed in water. We still have water coming into those neighborhoods and so my honest assessment is, is that we have a major disaster here where people are not going to be able to get into their homes for weeks, if not months.
So Bush, I guess, gets his briefings over the "airways". Wow, is that disquieting.
And note that even Michael Brown, whose name has become synonymous with "major fuckup", went on to say that "literally neighborhood after neighborhood" was "totally engulfed in water". So, Bush’s "dodged a bullet" excuse is simply lame.
Meanwhile, Bush is going to be attempting to do some serious damage control tonight (for himself, but ostensibly for the Gulf States) — he’s planning a televised nationwide address. For the time impaired, let me remind you that today is Tuesday, September 13. Katrina hit Monday, August 29. I’m just saying.
The documents highlight serious deficiencies in the Department of Homeland Security’s National Response Plan, a post-Sept. 11 playbook on how to deal with catastrophic events. Mr. Chertoff activated the National Response Plan last Tuesday by declaring the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina an "Incident of National Significance."
The plan, which was rolled out to much fanfare in January, essentially enables Washington to move federal assets to the disaster without waiting for requests from state officials. It then funnels help from all federal agencies through a single point of contact — usually the secretary of homeland security — a reform demanded after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
In one instance, federal environmental health specialists, who were charged with protecting both rescue workers and evacuees, weren’t called in by the Department of Homeland Security until Sunday — 12 days after the Occupational Safety & Health Administration announced it had teams from various agencies standing by ready to assist. Even now, with mounting evidence of environmental problems, the deployment is being held up by continuing interagency wrangling, according to officials at the National Institutes of Health, which also is involved in the effort.
***
In addition, FEMA’s official requests, known as tasking assignments and used by the agency to demand help from other government agencies, show that it first asked the Department of Transportation to look for buses to help evacuate the more than 20,000 people who had taken refuge at the Superdome in New Orleans at 1:45 a.m. on Aug. 31. At the time, it only asked for 455 buses and 300 ambulances for the enormous task. Almost 18 hours later, it canceled the request for the ambulances because it turned out, as one FEMA employee put it, "the DOT doesn’t do ambulances."
FEMA ended up modifying the number of buses it thought it needed to get the job done, until it settled on a final request of 1,355 buses at 8:05 p.m. on Sept. 3. The buses, though, trickled into New Orleans, with only a dozen or so arriving on the first day.
Hours before FEMA realized that it needed buses, Jonathan L. Snare, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA, said he was prepared to offer the full resources of the agency to help protect the safety and health of workers responding to Katrina.
Health and safety experts play an important role by testing the environment at a disaster for toxins, disease and pathogens. They then advise rescue workers about needs for protective clothing for themselves as well as for the people they are trying to move from harm’s way.
The National Response Plan gives OSHA responsibility to coordinate efforts to protect and monitor disaster workers and victims from environmental hazards.
But the part of the plan that authorizes OSHA’s role as coordinator and allows it to mobilize experts from other agencies such as NIH wasn’t activated by FEMA until shortly before 5 p.m. Sunday. The delay came despite repeated efforts by the agencies to mobilize.
Attempts by officials at NIH to reach FEMA officials and send them briefing materials by email failed as the agency’s server failed.
"I noticed that every email to a FEMA person bounced back this week. They need a better internet provider during disasters!!" one frustrated Department of Health official wrote to colleagues last Thursday.
By Friday, experts and officials from NIH, the Department of Labor and the Environmental Protection Agency began to make frantic calls to the Department of Homeland Security and members of Congress, demanding that the worker-safety portion of the national response plan be activated.
No reason has been offered by either FEMA or the Department of Homeland Security for the delay in activating OSHA’s role.